From the Frontline

"If I can turn the light on, I've still got my arms"

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:16:19 +0000

In Kabul last week, an American friend working there as a freelance journalist told me he’d dreamed the night before that his arms had been blown off. John Wendle said he’d woken up in a terrified sweat and turned on his bedside light. If I can turn the light on, he told himself, I’ve still got my arms.

In early December, he had been at Kabul’s Abu Fazal Shia shrine when a suicide bomber killed more than 50 people. A lot of friends were there, including AFP’s photographer Massoud Hossaini.

Massoud’s picture of a girl wearing a bright green dress and headscarf for the Shia Ashura ran on front pages worldwide.

It captures the moment that broke John’s sleep – the teenager is mid-scream, her clothes splashed with blood, hands splayed, face contorted with shock, terror, disbelief.

At her feet are bodies of men, women and children, many of them her relatives. There’s a bloodied baby sprawled across the back of his mother’s neck; she is face down, dead. Another girl, wearing black and on her knees, is crying. Blood runs down her cheek.

The picture is so graphic one can almost hear the screams. Massoud still hears the screams. One of his hands was injured; he’s not sure what lodged in it, but at first thought it might have been a bit of bone from one of the dead. Or even the bomber.

When I was AFP’s bureau chief in Kabul, Massoud and our other photographer, Shah Marai, used to wipe the blood and flesh and bone off their shoes when they came back from covering bomb attacks.

Massoud says he’s having nightmares and suddenly bursts into tears. He had to stop doing follow-ups, he said, like going to hospitals to photograph survivors.

John has seen a counselor; she told him he is doing ok. “I know I am. But I worry it’s going to happen again. And more people will die,” he said.

There will be more attacks in Kabul and more people will die, needlessly, pointlessly. The Taleban have long been inside the wire and there’s a belief they’ll make their presence felt ahead of any peace talks.

I've just spent a few months as media adviser to the EU’s Kabul delegation, and the experience has shaken my confidence in the durability of the international project in Afghanistan.

Many young and capable Afghans do have faith in a peaceful, prosperous, secure and free future, and they're prepared to work hard for it. Many others are scrambling to get themselves, their families and their money out before 2014, when foreign combat troops will withdraw.

And for the foreigners? “It’s a fight without a fucking point,” as one friend, an NGO official, put it to me soon after I returned in October.

A TV reporter told me his fin de siecle moment came at a ball in Kabul when a senior military officer was so drunk she could only stay upright by holding onto the back of his dinner jacket. “That’s when I thought: ‘We’ve lost this’,” he said.

For me it was last week, when I heard tales from a party at a UN compound in Kabul where at least two Western ambassadors were said to have stripped to leap into the pool.

The pretence of victory in Afghanistan is dropping as fast as a vodka-fuelled diplomat's boxer shorts and now the imperative is to say that at least we, the West, didn't lose. Just as it ever was, the losers will be the Afghans.

Time to fly a kite for Afghanistan's future

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 12:17:34 +0000

The glass encrusted string of a cheap paper kite sliced chunks of flesh out of my fingers when I tried Afghanistan’s national sport on a recent windy Friday in Kabul.

Like much of what goes on in Afghanistan, kite flying is complex and violent. In what is essentially a fight to the death, the aim is to entice another kite into a duel and then get ahead of it so the string of one’s own kite can slice through that of the opponent.

The joy is in seeing the defeated kite float pathetically downwards to its death.

In the suburban back yard of my friend's home, the cry goes up: “He’s cut, he’s cut.”

Kite flying -- or gudiparan bazi -- holds romantic memories for my friend, one of a large family of over-achievers. As teenagers, he and his half-dozen brothers made kites to fly over the homes of girls they had crushes on.

The Taliban banned kite flying; it was as decadent as dancing, music and white shoes. After the Taliban’s fall a decade ago, Afghans celebrated by taking to the skies.

The kites still fight, but the joy is fading. Afghans, my friend told me, are losing hope in their future.

“When the only message people hear is that all hope is lost, eventually they will lose all hope. And once hope is lost, it is difficult to regain,” he said.

“Now is the time to change it, to turn it around, to give people hope that things can get better and that change is up to them.”

Problem is, the message Afghans hear swings from one extreme to the other, and each end of the spectrum lacks credibility.

Western political and military supporters of the Afghan government struggle for traction as they constantly proclaim imminent victory, when all evidence appears to the contrary.

At the other end of the scale are those who say civil war is inevitable once the Western military leaves the corrupt and incompetent Afghan security forces in charge.

The Taliban leadership live comfortably in their “safe havens,” free from fear of IEDs or suicide bombers -- or even public opinion.

A targeted assassination campaign has spooked the political elite, boosted the confidence of pro-Taliban Islamists, highlighted a lack of political reform and sowed doubt that presidential elections slated for 2014 will even take place.

Western officials shrug about the millions of dollars carried out of the country almost daily, though the theft feeds into the feeling there's only three years left to cream off as much as possible and get the hell out before the Westerners cut and run.

My kite-flying friend, recently returned with US citizenship and an Ivy League degree, says he and his brothers “want to do some good for our country”. He’s got his insurance policy nevertheless.

The rhetoric from all players in this game lacks reality. There is no long-term strategy for a country that for a decade has lurched from one international conference to the next, hand outstretched for more cash to funnel into dodgy real estate and numbered bank accounts, while millions don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

In December, Bonn will host the latest in the decade-long series of international conferences on Afghanistan, where President Karzai’s government will be called on to account for itself.

Many of the pledges made at what should have been the most important of the series, last year’s Kabul conference, have yet to be fulfilled, and BonnTwo is expected to yield little more than a promisory note to do better.

What if, instead of engaging in the futile exercise of trying to cut each other out, those parties that stand to benefit from a stable, secure and hopeful Afghanistan use Bonn as an opportunity for some fresh diplomatic thinking?

Afghanistan has the potential to be the centrifugal force that brings Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, India and Turkey into a dialogue of mutually-interested parties, which includes the United States, Britain, the EU and NATO, and could ultimately, over the long term, shift the balance in some of the most fractious bilateral relationships and bring a new dimension to the geopolitics of this region.

Time, perhaps, to fly a kite that might have a chance of staying aloft.

Afghanistan: once again the saddest place on earth

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 08:42:46 +0000

The siege of Qala-I-Jangi on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif in late November 2001 resulted in one of the most horrific war atrocities of the modern age.
The massacre raised questions about the commitment of Afghanistan’s new rulers and their international sponsors to the rule of law, and cemented General Abdul Rashid Dostum’s reputation as a brutal and ruthless warlord.
Hundreds, possibly thousands of Taliban fighters, mostly from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya and the Arab states, were killed when the US fired missiles and dropped bombs on Dostum’s 19th century mud fortress, where they had fled after escaping custody. Others were burned to death when Northern Alliance soldiers sprayed fuel from tankers on a school building where they were hiding, and then sprayed it with gunfire to set it alight. Many more were locked in containers to suffocate in the stifling heat or to be dropped from helicopters to another form of certain death. The foreign fighters reportedly killed those Afghans among them who wanted to surrender as the eight-day siege dragged on.
There was no mercy shown during that week I spent crouched outside the Qala-I-Jangi, feeling as if I was living a George MacDonald Fraser novel and half expecting to see Harry Flashman slithering through the dirt to save his own hide.
British Special Forces roared around in utility trucks, threatening to shoot journalists who filmed them; US Special Forces holed up in the sprawling compounds of minor warlords in downtown Mazar, living on their own ready-made rations; B2 bombers circled overhead; and armed CIA agents strode the walls of the fort barking orders in Uzbek at the Northern Alliance soldiers under their tutelage.
Dostum flew north to Uzbekistan while the fighting raged, but rushed back when the coast was clear. He invited the international media into the Qala-I-Jangi, and sat on a high-backed chair as he surveyed the destruction of his HQ, strewn with Taliban body parts, and claimed victory.
It had been obvious when the invasion began on October 7 that the Taliban’s autarkic regime would soon crumble into the dust. Hope had been evident in the wave of an elderly Afghan man who stood on the bank of the Amu Daria watching the barge that brought me, and a crowd of other foreign reporters, down the river into Afghanistan from the horrible Uzbek border town of Termez.
It was like stepping through a tear in the fabric of time, back to the 13th century – a sensation not dispelled by the dignified gent in a tall, grey Astrakhan hat who stood at the door of my guesthouse and tried to force me into a burkha each time I left. He also brought breakfast of bread, apricot jam and an enormous pot of tea to my room at 6 o’clock each morning.
Hope was alive in the heart of the mother of five I interviewed a couple of days after sitting at Dostum’s knee as he extolled the virtues of the new, free Afghan state. She had been a university lecturer before the Taliban’s misogynistic time, and then while forced inside her home by the cane-wielding vice police, had taught her four intelligent daughters to tile kitchens and bathrooms, and weave carpets, so they would not starve should the nightmare never end.
In those heady days of early December 2001, as the defeated Taliban made their way across the border to their Pakistani refuges, she had already abandoned the burkha and was looking forward to going back to work and getting her girls back to school. Life was, once more, theirs for the taking. Or so they believed.
Now, after 10 years of mistakes and misrule, the Taliban’s footfall is again heard across the north, and fear encroaches on the hopes of ordinary people to live ordinary lives. The women of Mazar-I-Sharif are once more taking refuge behind the veil, dressing for the return of the illogical hatred they have already known and had thought they were well rid of.
Ten years after eyebrows and ire were raised worldwide at the tactics used to get rid of the murderous brutality of thugs hiding behind religion, smart Afghan people talk of the Taliban’s return as inevitable, and clever commentators seem to delight in the apparent failure of efforts to graft modern democracy onto the ancient Afghan body politic.
Many of those with money and connections are leaving their country, hoping to secure a future abroad for their children as Afghanistan appears on the verge of collapse and the prospect of civil war looms as an encroaching reality. Amid political gridlock, financial collapse, endemic corruption, and never-ending violence, few want to believe that we are witnessing the last desperate gasps of a failed and dying insurgency. What even fewer want to acknowledge is that Afghanistan's blood- and tear-stained soil is the battleground for a hot war between the United States and Pakistan.
As the light of hope dims, Afghanistan is again one of the saddest places on earth.

Lynne O’Donnell covered the Qala-i-Jangi siege for The Australian, for whom she was China correspondent from 1998-2002. She was Kabul bureau chief for Agence France-Presse 2009-2010. This article was first written for Afghan Scene magazine.

Ten years after 9/11, from pre-emptive attack to liberal interventionism

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:33:55 +0000

I was on a train in northwest China, from Urumqi, provincial capital of Xinjiang, to the oasis town of Kashgar when the atrocities of 9-11 happened ten years ago. The region borders largely Islamic Central Asia -- including Pakistan and Afghanistan -- and is the homeland of China’s ethnic Uighur Muslims.

On the dot of 9 am Beijing time on September 12, half way through the long journey across the desert, my phone rang. It was my assistant in Beijing.

“I thought you might want to know what is happening in America,” she said. “There are 40,000 people dead in New York and the president is missing.”

Then the phone went dead. I told my traveling companion Miss Li’s news -- which I had no way of knowing was exaggerated -- and wondered: “Has Osama bin Laden launched world war three?”

It was three hours before the phone signal returned, and then with a call from an American friend in Beijing, who had turned on his TV before going to bed, in time to see the second plane smash into the World Trade Centre. Al Qaeda was the only culprit in the picture.

I was Beijing correspondent for The Australian, a national daily broadsheet owned by Rupert Murdoch, and until that moment had been one of the highest profile foreign reporters on the paper, reflecting China’s growing importance to Australia. My trip to Xinjiang aimed to yield stories on China’s Muslim dimension, then secondary to the Tibet issue that commanded so much attention in the Western world.

By the time my train pulled into Kashgar, about 24 hours after Miss Li’s call, the axis of the world’s news had swiveled away from Beijing to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many of my Beijing colleagues had scrambled for planes to Islamabad, and some photographer friends were now being chased through the streets of Peshawar by angry mobs.

In Kashgar, the mood was sombre and fearful. The televisions that blared in the corners of cafes and shops did not show footage of the attacks, or their aftermath. The state-controlled news didn’t even put the story at the top of bulletins. (I did not see any of that newsreel until a Christmas trip home.)

After the initial shock, the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus sought to downplay the events of 9-11, to ensure the oppressed and marginalised Muslims under its yolk did not get any anti-authoritarian ideas of their own. Security forces were mobilised across the north-west.

True to form, in the following months and years, the Chinese authorities came down hard on the Muslims of Xinjiang, harnessing the language of the US government’s “war on terror” and using the excuse of “Islamist terrorism” to terrorise its Uighur population.

It was days before I was able to regain the attention of my editors in Sydney, and convince them that maybe I could be useful. Pakistan was only a couple of hours’ drive up the Karakoram Highway after all, and I could probably be in Peshawar in a day or so.

Though I did manage to wrest a few column inches for my Kashgar dateline, it was a couple of weeks before the focus of coverage shifted from the United States. So I took myself to Uzbekistan, and traveled across Central Asia reporting on the arc of Islamism that had barely registered in Australia.

From the miserable Uzbek border town of Termez, I rode a barge down the Oxus River into northern Afghanistan in time to cover a siege of the warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum’s mud fort by a few hundred escaped Taliban fighters, mainly Arabs and Pakistanis.

The seven-day siege ended just after dawn one morning when the Americans fired an intercontinental ballistic missile from a warship in the Gulf into the middle of the fort, about 15km outside Mazar-i-Sharif. I woke up to the boom, and sat bolt upright in my Soviet-era bunk to see a massive mushroom cloud of smoke and dust roiling above the horizon.

Soon I was walking through the Qala-I-Jangi, taking photos of the bits of bodies -- men in shalwar kameez cut in half as they ran from the blast, their eyes and mouths open in terror and fury, their guts and brains spilled onto the grey ground. It was still early, the air was cool, there was no buzz of flies or the stench of rotting human flesh that can cling to one’s own skin for days afterwards. These gruesome sculptures were unreal, unworldly, as if made from resin or stone.

The events of 9-11 changed the world, indeed changed my life. My career has since pivoted around war and atrocity, human cruelty and misery, taking me to Iraq, across the Middle East, Madrid, Morocco, London, Mumbai, and most recently to Kabul, where I was AFP bureau chief with a front row seat for the frontline mess that country has become.

Ten years on, Osama bin Laden is dead, Al-Qaeda is imploding, democratic revolutions are breaking out across the Arab world, and now-wary Western governments have travelled a troubled path from pre-emptive attack to liberal interventionism. That Pakistan's threat has intensified remains open to question, while Libyans appear in control of their post-dictatorship destiny.

Amid all the hand-wringing regret about the follies that followed the invasion of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, perhaps it is time to roll back the fear, restore the liberties that were eroded in the name of national security, and return to the humanist values that gave the West, particularly the United States, its exceptional moral standing in the pre-9-11 world.

*****

Afghan transition: Just another word for nothing left to lose?

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:19:23 +0000

Afghanistan appears on the verge of collapse. The prospect of civil war looms.

Political gridlock; the impending collapse of the banking system; falling currency and property values; endemic corruption; capital flight; frozen aid funding; escalating insurgent attacks; ethnic groups planning to re-arm; a power vacuum in the south; targeted assassinations... this is the landscape of transition.

As American combat troops begin a drawdown calibrated to the US election calendar, leaders such as General David Petraeus are persisting with the spin -- that it’s just a matter of time before victory over the Taleban can be categorically declared -- that justifies their promotions.

A minor detail that the man dubbed “the emperor” failed to focus on in his valedictory interviews is the Taleban’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for the peace talks upon which this elusive victory depends.

Afghan security forces have acquitted themselves well in recent attacks on the capital, though no one pretends they are yet capable of standing alone. If sporadic incidents were all they had to do deal with, then perhaps hope would prevail.

But as the domestic media report, Afghans are overshadowed by the fear of a Taleban return, and their already querulous loyalty to the democratic experiment is being tested by the survival imperative.

Afghanistan Today (www.afghanistan-today.org) reports that foreign troops are being replaced by foreign insurgents in the border badlands, with locals professing a preference for Islamists as the headless bodies of village elders are left to rot in the streets as a warning to detractors.

On a reporting visit to Mazar-I-Sharif late last summer, during my tenure as AFP’s Kabul bureau chief, to investigate the encroachment of the insurgency in the once-peaceful north, I found people of the region all-but resigned to a Taleban resurgence.

Most notably, women who after the Taleban’s fall in 2001 were initially reticent then jubilantly confident in throwing off their veils, were retreating once more behind the burqa -- just in case.

Kandahar, the Taleban’s so-called "heartland", is without leadership as the governor has, local sources say, left for a long summer break. Who can blame him, when many of his political peers are six feet under, thanks to a recent Taleban turban-bomb killing spree?

Kabulis used to joke that the only thing that would delay a Taleban assault on the presidential palace after the foreign troops have gone was the gridlocked traffic.

No one is joking any more. It might take 15 days, 15 months or 15 years, said an Afghan friend of mine in London. “But they’ll be back. It’s just a matter of time.”

For Afghan first nephews, US passports are ticket out of chaos

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 07:22:10 +0000

The assassination of Ahmad Wali Karzai, the Afghan president’s half-brother, has dealt a huge blow to transition plans and is likely to lead to major power struggles across the country’s south as rival clans fight to fill the power vacuum created by his death.

What may effectively become a civil war could undermine the security gains made against the Taleban in the region they view as their power base, and create opportunities for the insurgency to reassert itself amid the coming chaos.

While the Taleban were quick to claim responsibility, Ahmad Karzai’s enemies were legion. Rumours range from a simple personal dispute to revenge for the killings of rival tribal leaders. He was close to the United States, and widely regarded as a font of corruption.

His funeral will present a massive security headache and a natural target for a Taleban attack.

My closest contact with Ahmad Karzai came after one of the many accusations he faced of drug running. Amid threats to call in his “New York lawyers” -- surely a status symbol for any Afghan warlord -- he invited me to Kandahar so he could use an interview to rebut the latest allegations.

Ahmad Karzai’s compound in central Kandahar was the region’s seat of power, abuzz with activity as tribal elders, politicians, Afghan and international military leaders, Western diplomats, and ordinary people revolved through to pay tribute and seek advise. The prospect of meeting the King of Kandahar, as he was known, was tantalising.

To make the most of what was to be a fleeting visit, I contacted his American-born nephews, who had moved from California to Kandahar to set up their own security firm a couple of doors down from Uncle Ahmad’s place. They were eager to please and excited at the prospect of being written about, offering transport, security, access.

This was in the middle of 2010, as the US military surge was concentrating on Kandahar and its surrounds and Taleban murders of people associated with the civilian government, the foreign military, overseas aid groups, and their families, had become daily events. Contacts in the city advised against going, saying all foreigners had left, local journalists were too afraid to go outdoors, and many had sent their families out of the city.

With the assurance of young Zak and his brother, and the implicit protection of their uncle, I was willing to take the risk. A great story looked a sure thing.

The night before I was set to leave Kabul, where I was bureau chief for the French news agency AFP, on an early morning flight to Kandahar, a call came from Ahmad Karzai’s office. I was politely told the interview was cancelled because he had some pressing business to attend to outside the city. He offered to reschedule but no date was mentioned.

I’d still go to Kandahar, I thought; the nephews will make a superb yarn -- a couple of California boys living it large under the wing of the most powerful man in the Afghan south, at the heart of the war zone. I’d heard about their parties, their lifestyle, their cars, their jewelry. How could I not go?

That bubble was burst within minutes of the call from Ahmad Karzai’s office, with a text from nephew Zak saying it was all off. Sorry. No explanation. No subsequent calls were answered. Nothing was ever rescheduled.

I have met other members of the Karzai clan, always eager to declare their membership of Afghanistan's first family, often a propos of nothing. For the nephews who came to Kandahar to seek fun and fortune, the only advantage they may now have is the American passports that can take them out of the line of fire that is about to erupt.

Hacking scandal will bring seismic change to British media

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 08:14:54 +0000

Britain’s media industry is about to undergo seismic change. The implications of the latest revelations about journalists hacking telephone voicemail systems have clearly shown that the country’s famously feisty and fiercely independent news outlets are incapable of self regulation.

Senior executives of News International are under a harsh spotlight as it becomes ever more evident that phone hacking was part of the corporate culture, along with the payment of bribes to police officers in return for information about investigations.

Prime Minister David Cameron supports an independent inquiry amid calls for a commission to regulate the media, which would effectively end the farcical assumption that the industry is capable of defining its own boundaries.

Newsrooms can be tough places in which to shine, where the pressure to perform combined with reporters' ambition and competition can be a toxic combination, and lead to some questionable methods for getting the big story, the fine quote, the front page byline.

Anecdotes about abrasive news editors, obnoxious reporters and the veracity of stories from the field are the stuff of Fleet Street legend, and journalists have long laughed behind their hands about made-up quotes, even made-up stories. While this is not confined to the British media, the papers here are well known for their colourful personalities and practices.

When multinational companies pull their advertising, the laughing quickly stops.

While it seemed confined to celebrities and politicians, this scandal provoked little more than tuts and eyerolls among a public that generally knows not to believe everything they read in the papers. But following news that the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Millie Dowler was hacked, days after she disappeared and while her family and the police were still searching for her, the public mood has turned to one of revulsion.

It does seem beyond comprehension that those responsible did not know that listening to and deleting voicemails was morally, let alone legally, wrong. It is unbelievable that those running the News of the World at the time did not know what was going on as stories were published referring to the content of hacked voicemail messages.

Each hour seems to bring more news of how little integrity the newspaper had when it came to staying ahead of the savage British press pack. With implications that bereaved relatives of Afghanistan and Iraq war dead were also hacked, this episode moves into the realm of the profoundly sick.

A man whose son was killed in the terrorist attacks in London on July 7, 2005 told the BBC that police involved in the phone hacking investigations had “found a file” that contained personal information, including an unlisted phone number.

After the attacks, Graham Foukes said he and other families “were in a very dark place, and we were using the phone frantically trying to get information, talking to families and friends, and talking very intimately about very personal issues. The thought that these guys may have been listening to that is horrendous.”

Mr Foukes said he would like to meet Rupert Murdoch, head of News International which owns the News of the World, “face to face, and have an in-depth discussion with him about responsibility and the power that he has, and how it should be used appropriately”.

Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, said she knew nothing of the phone hacking despite then being editor of the paper. She did, however, tell a parliamentary committee in 2003 that the paper paid police for information -- which has been illegal in Britain for around a century.

Mrs Brooks artfully quoted former US President Harry Trueman that “the buck stops here” during her editorship while running a campaign to change the law on pedophiles. As calls grow louder for her to go, it remains to be seen just where the buck stops for Mr Murdoch.

Afghan free media is a matter of time, says one who should know

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:01:17 +0000

Afghanistan’s media industry is one of the youngest and most vibrant in the world, having burst into life to fill the vacuum left just 10 years ago by the demise of the Taliban.

From a country without music or movies, Afghanistan is now jam-packed with radio, television, newspapers, magazines, film, music and theatre. Much comes and goes, and a consolidating shake-out has yet to level the playing field.

For media entrepreneurs like Sardar Ahmad Khan, Afghanistan is a land of opportunity. It's tough, competitive, full of challenges and inevitable disappointments, but energy and creativity can still find traction.

Sardar, a confidently suave father of three with frighteningly idiomatic English learnt from US soldiers while he was covering US-led operations for AFP at Bagram airbase in the early years after the 2001 invasion, saw his opportunity as foreign journalists streamed in behind the retreating Taliban.

"Like it or not, it was clear that the era of media freedom had come to Afghanistan,"; he says.

"I knew the Afghanistan story would remain in the Western headlines for quite a while and this gave me the idea to do something to be a part of this fascinating industry.

"I tried a couple of other ideas - a weekly news magazine or a monthly fashion magazine, but both failed to find a market.

So the idea of creating a media facilitating company came to mind, to provide services to the hundreds of Western journalists who were based in the country or visiting from time to time.

"Traveling outside Kabul as a journalist myself, I always relied on local assistance for a good story, so I knew that without a good local helping hand, be it a fixer or contacts or even a good driver, you can't get a good story. That’s where the idea came from.

"Then I had to pick a name: catchy, of course, but also immediately conveying what I was offering. I came up with Pressistan - press In English, and istan, the Dari word for land or country. And I attached ‘Kabul’ to give it an Afghan identity. And so, three years ago, Kabul Pressistan came to life."

Since then, Sardar - who holds down two jobs, as correspondent for AFP and managing director of Kabul Pressistan - has taken his inspiration from others who have built successful media companies, foremost among them Saad Mohseni, the man behind Tolo TV, the country’s most popular, and innovative, channel.

Kabul Pressistan has grown from a simple fixing/translation service into a comprehensive "one-stop shop" as Sardar likes to call it, offering a wide range of media services, including video, photo and text reporting, stringing, facilitating, monitoring, and training."It's been quick to make use of social media, with 3,400 friends on Facebook and a growing following on Twitter.

A recently launched SMS service has found a ready market for its breaking news and security alerts among the media, diplomatic and aid communities in Kabul and beyond.

Clients have included Western ambassadors, NGOs, and US and NATO military personnel, as well as journalists who have left glowing testimonials on the website - kabulpressistan.com.

Harper's writer Matthieu Aikins called the company "the Cadillac of Kabul-based fixers" while Singapore freelance photographer Simon Lim said simply: "Kabul Pressistan is a godsend."

Media freedom is yet to be institutionalised in Afghanistan, so censorship can be arbitrary - nervous military police, for instance, pointing their weapons at journalists covering suicide attacks.

Media is one of the few things that has thrived in post-Taliban Afghanistan but still we have a rocky journey ahead to claim we have a competent free media in this country,” Sardar says.

One of the biggest challenges is the lack of expertise and competent journalists and media manpower. We have lots of television stations, for example, but we don't have good journalists and experts to run them; we have hundreds of radio stations but we don't have people to produce content for them."

While others see a bleak future for the country and even imminent civil war as warlords and the Taliban compete to fill the vacuum that will be left by exiting foreign troops, Sardar strikes an optimistic note: "I'm working towards that time when all my dreams will have come true and all my plans comes to fruition - a couple of TV channels, a serious weekly news magazine like Newsweek, a network of radio stations and a huge production house."

Laughing at his own ambition, he adds: "I think we will definitely see the day Afghanistan has a truly free media and the manpower that it needs. The future is, without a doubt, bright."

Australian media access to Afghan mission vital for understanding

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:07:49 +0000

It’s been a bad year for the Australian military fighting in Afghanistan. Three soldiers were killed in May, another in early June, bringing the total to 27 since Australia committed troops to the coalition that invaded Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 2001.

The deaths highlighted for Australians the reality of being at war and led to calls from some commentators for an immediate withdrawal, to end the waste of Australian blood and treasure for no discernible return.

It was wrong, they said, for Australia to have such a huge commitment -- more than AUD$7 billion by this time next year -- to a far-away place posing no threat to the homeland. Afghanistan would never become a democracy in our own image, women would never enjoy equality, the authorities would always be corrupt and, as soon as the alliance pulled out, warlords would roam at will and the Taleban would take their place in government.

The Australian government’s justification for engagement in Afghanistan was boiled down to simple politics -- the obligation to stand by Washington. Afghanistan would never be the safe haven for terrorists that Prime Minister Julia Gillard claimed. Australia’s strategic interests were not at stake, they said; success as defined by the defeat of the Taleban was an impossible dream.

How many of these writers, I wondered, had been to Afghanistan? Stepping off a plane behind a politician chasing a photo op, before stepping right back on again, doesn’t count. How many of them had lived, worked, talked with, questioned and listened to the Australian men and women serving in Afghanistan?

The answer is very few, because the Australian political and defense establishments restrict media access to the Uruzgan mission. Unlike the US military, the Australian defense forces do not welcome the presence of embedded journalists.

This lack of interaction perpetuates a general misunderstanding about realities on the ground, creating the impression that Australian soldiers are fighting a hot war 24/7. They are not.

The most important task of the Australian military in Afghanistan is the training and mentoring of Afghanistan’s security forces. Those calling for immediate withdrawal fail to understand how important this arduous task is, that without competent armed forces and police, Afghanistan cannot look after itself, and until it can step up, the Western alliance is obliged to remain.

Those saying terrorists are unlikely to regroup in Afghanistan, and use it as a base for attacks elsewhere, do not understand its geography, its relationship with Pakistan, or the opportunism of extremist groups. US media have reported that Al Qaeda has moved back into Afghan border regions, establishing training camps, as US forces now concentrate on populated areas.

Those who say Australia’s vital interests are not at stake fail to understand radical Islamist ideology and its goals -- and appear to forget that Australians have already been targeted, most notably in Indonesia.

Australians would benefit from informed analysis of the mission in Afghanistan. Political and military leaders would benefit from an intelligent relationship with the media. Serving men and women would be better honoured by a greater understanding of their work.

Politicians, diplomats and military leaders are quick to blame journalists for poor reporting and thin grasp of issues. Those who are tightest of lip are usually harshest in their criticism.

Solid analysis of the strategy and the lack of cohesion between the military and political objectives is lacking in Australia’s coverage of the war in Afghanistan. But the blame lies with the government and its defense establishment. The Australian people -- including military and media -- deserve better.

Frontline: reporting from the world's deadliest places

Fri, 13 May 2011 17:56:06 +0000

A newly revised and updated edition of Frontline by David Loyn was published this week.

The acclaimed book chronicles the work of the Frontline news agency, founded by journalists Rory Peck, Peter Jouvenal, Vaughan Smith and Nicholas Della Casa.

First published in 2005, the latest edition features a foreword from BBC world affairs editor John Simpson, who writes that the book is “the history of a moment in television news, which was brief enough, yet so bright it will stay in the minds of everyone who experienced it, like staring into a torch-beam on a dark night.”

Frontline Television’s reporters were motivated to document the true horrors of war and courageously went where other news organisations feared to tread. Risking everything to show the truth, they travelled the world’s most dangerous places in a quest to live life to the full, a quest some paid for with their lives. (Two of FTV’s founders, Peck and Della Casa, are now dead: killed in action.)

Between them, this colourful collection of adventurers and ex-army officers captured some of the key images at the end of the Cold War, and the fractured, fissile world which emerged.

The way they lived and died was an anachronism; they were eccentrics who might have been happier fighting wars in the British Empire a century before. Instead, they brought back pictures from the worst war zones the late twentieth century had to offer. And it suited them.

For the men of Frontline, how things were done was as important as what was done. All four of the founders, and those they recruited, shared the same panache, wit, and disdain for authority, planning the next trip to the Hindu Kush in the bar of the Ritz.

Their story reads like a latter-day Rudyard Kipling adventure. But while their lives may have been lived as if they were still playing the Great Game, they also cared passionately about their work and the truth it conveyed.

Part Bang Bang Club, part Flashman, Frontline is the gripping story of lives lived to the full in some of the worst places on earth.

The book can be purchased by visiting this link.

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Praise for Frontline:

“Loyn does a terrific job. His methodical, journalistic approach is perfect for grounding out a yarn that nobody would dare make up” Time Out – Book of the Week

“A gripping story, splashed with devil-may-care colour and scarcely credible tales of derring-do” The Guardian

“Girls, booze, physical hardship and flying bullets ... Loyn keeps his narrative rattling along nicely” Daily Mail

“Barnstorming non-fiction. Every page is full of the kind of chutzpah, grit and valour that makes your own nine-to-five seem gut-wrenchingly futile.” Arena

“Hugely entertaining ... the nearest thing to a Victorian adventure romp of empire against a background of fine marijuana, ‘Hotel California’, and the wheep and chirrup of satellite technology” Literary review

Bin Laden death sets up end game for the Taliban

Sat, 07 May 2011 13:57:18 +0000

If Pakistan has become such a dangerous place, as the joke doing the rounds of the streetside cafes goes, that even Osama bin Laden isn’t safe there, then the leaders of the Taliban waging war in Afghanistan had better start looking over their shoulders.

Conjecture about the involvement of Pakistani authorities in the operation that killed bin Laden has mainly concentrated on whether they knew he was living in the biggest compound in the garrison town of Abbotabad, a short drive from Islamabad.

Bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan was certainly no surprise to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has been vindicated in his long insistence that the source of global terrorism is not amongst the poor villages of his own country, but over the border in Pakistan.

The president, often derided for his habit of blaming the West for the problems his government fails to address, has looked genuinely happy basking in his I-told-you-so moment.

He has emerged with enhanced stature, and now faces the possibility that his efforts to lay the groundwork for peace talks to end the war could benefit as a direct result of bin Laden’s death.

Days after bin Laden was killed, on May 2, I took part in my capacity as former Kabul bureau chief for the AFP news agency in a Frontline Club panel discussion on the impact his death is likely to have.

Like most of my fellow panelists, I suggested that the fact of his death is unlikely to make much difference to the overall landscape of global terrorism, as Al Qaeda is an idea, rather than a man.

I also suggested that with the removal of the celebrity figurehead of global terrorism, the hollowness of the Al Qaeda creed -- essentially, the murder of non-Muslims -- would be laid bare, as would the lack of standing the group and its leadership have in the general global jihadi millieu.

Taliban commanders never looked to bin Laden for leadership, and their current ‘spring offensive‘ will be unaffected by his demise. The Al Qaeda leadership will pass down the hierarchy, and there is likely to be a period of consolidation within the group and the Islamist community generally. We may see some retaliatory attacks on Western targets, as threatened in the Al Qaeda's acknowledgement that their leader had indeed been killed. It is just as likely that they will see that without a poster boy, they have nothing on which to hang their shingle. It must have galled bin Laden to see that the regimes he had railed against for decades are being toppled and threatened, not by fervent supporters of violent Sharia, but by people using Facebook and Twitter to call for modern concepts like democracy and freedom of speech.

Importantly for Afghanistan, the death of bin Laden makes it possible for the Taliban now to comply with one of the main conditions of their participation in Karzai’s peace process -- the renouncement of links and loyalty to Al Qaeda.

If, as I strongly suspect, bin Laden was handed over to the United States by Pakistan’s intelligence and military establishment, a very clear message has been sent to the Taliban leadership, who are also harboured on Pakistani soil, from where they plan, man and fund the escalating war of horrors in Afghanistan.

Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Taliban leader, and the Quetta Shura, its leadership council, have been placed on notice by the Pakistanis. They will participate in Karzai’s peace process, and they will do so as proxies for Islamabad, to ensure Pakistan emerges as the controlling force of Afghanistan’s future.

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency is playing a long game for control of Afghanistan, and the death of Osama bin Laden is only its latest strategic move.

Fukushima: in the shadow of the Semipalatinsk mushroom cloud

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 05:54:02 +0000

As Japan struggles to contain the Fukushima nuclear crisis, comparisons are being made with the Chernobyl disaster, which happened on 26 April, 1986, when an explosion and fire at the Ukrainian power station released enormous quantities of radioactive material across Russia and Europe. Deaths due to the contamination have been put close to a million.

But it is Semipalatinsk that demonstrates the truly destructive potential of nuclear, and its ability to wipe out humanity through the gradual generational degradation of DNA, rendering life as we know it unviable and so, ultimately, extinct.

Semipalatinsk was the site of the Soviet Union’s foray into the future, with the detonation of almost 500 nuclear bombs. As I found when I made the long journey as a correspondent for The Australian a few years ago, it is one of the bleakest places on the planet, on the northern Kazakh steppe near the borders of Siberia and Russia. Since 2007 it has been called Semey.

The Semipalatinsk Test Site, also known as Ground Zero, was secret until the USSR’s collapse in 1991, though of course the Soviets could not hide the fact that they were exploding nuclear bombs. They just kept denying it.

The people of Semipalatinsk were not warned about the 340 underground and 116 atmospheric bombs exploded between 1946 and 1986. They could only wonder why the sky regularly turned red, the roofs of their houses blew off, and massive mushroom clouds hid the sun.??

Nor did they know why their children and their farm animals were being born with two heads, or their legs on backwards, or no legs. Or with their spines exposed. Or with tiny heads. Or with huge heads. Or when their kin became psychotic. Or when their headaches became so unbearable they could only bash their heads against the wall. Or when lesions grew on their bodies and faces, making them look like a casting call for The Elephant Man.?

Old glass cabinets in a university laboratory overlooking a garden strewn with toppled Lenin statues display hundreds of specimen bottles, each containing a pickled foetus - some species indeterminate -- hidden from the Soviet authorities, who made it illegal to preserve deformities such as these.??

The most horrific is a baby boy. He's huge, perhaps 10 pounds, and bonny, the baby any mother would be thrilled to hold. Except for one thing: in the middle of his forehead is just one, huge eye. This is Cyclops.?

Three generations in Semipalatinsk are witness to the true fallout of radioactivity. A lovely woman with bad skin took me to orphanages and hospitals and rehabilitation centres, introducing me to the deformed, to doctors, to women’s groups fighting for help from their government, to scientists trying to patch together what knowledge they could from the documentation that had not been destroyed by the fleeing Soviets.

I said that she seemed lucky to be in good health. She looked at me with incredulity. I have 15 different types of cancer, she said. You can’t see my illness, but that doesn’t mean I am not suffering. No one has escaped.

Japan has had Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Japanese scientists and charities are active in Semipalatinsk. As they struggle with Fukushima, the Japanese are perhaps the only people on earth who truly understand the extent of the horror they are battling.

Have our leaders learned nothing from the war in Afghanistan?

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:07:35 +0000

Conversation among decision makers who gather in London's private dining rooms has turned from Afghanistan to Libya. Over rare beef and fine wine, they voice concern that Western governments have again embarked on a rushed military adventure, in a far away place, on a vague premise, with no clearly defined goal, and no apparent exit point. What is the end game, ask some of the most influential men and women in the country. Do our leaders know what they are getting us in to? Have they learned nothing?

Afghanistan, it seems, has become the object lesson.

David Miliband, Britain's former foreign secretary, has joined the chorus singing from the hymn sheet of a political solution to the Afghanistan conflict, a new recruit to the latter-day wise who claim, after ten years and two-and-a-half thousand body bags, to recognise a military quagmire when they see one.

Afghanistan is set to become the 'forgotten war', overshadowed in the public and political consciousness by events in the Middle East. Nothing could be worse for the Afghan people, exhausted as they are by war, poverty, corruption, and decades of being fought over by the well-meaning and the venal, each equally difficult to determine from the other.

The road to hell is paved with Afghans’ patience, endurance and hopes for peace, and recent shocking events in Mazar-i-Sharif - where United Nations employees were set upon and murdered by a mob - should be seen as a warning that progress in the margins of a bureaucrat’s ledger is meaningless to a man who cannot go to bed at night secure in the knowledge that his door will not be kicked down, by either side of those fighting for his heart and mind.

US Army Lt General William Caldwell, arguably the most important man in Afghanistan today, recently breezed through London to tell anyone who would listen about his efforts to build Afghanistan’s security forces. Withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan depends on the success of General Caldwell’s mission to build an army that can keep insurgents at bay, and a police force that can fairly enforce laws backed by a credible judicial system.

The mob attack in Mazar, where the police seemed incapable of controlling the situation, showed there is still a long way to go. But General Caldwell does not have the luxury of failure as an option. And London’s chattering classes, who accept the commitment to Afghanistan is a fait accompli, want him to succeed. They just don’t have the stomach for another war with no end.

Picture credit: United States Marine Corps Official Page via a creative commons licence.

Why the revolution should leave Midan Tahrir, for a moment at least

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 10:33:05 +0000

Davide Morandini on the opposition's decision to suspend demonstrations, and cancel today’s protests calling for the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) to step down.

There is not much to do in Midan Tahrir for the revolution, now less than ever. This is what most of the Egyptian opposition forces seem to realise in these dramatic days of chaotic protests. The Midan falling back into some kind of surreal ‘normality’ is certainly not the result of the Army’s violent, ruthless comeback, neither of a loss of revolutionary fervour by the forces of the opposition. It is a sign, hopefully of change.

On Thursday morning, soldiers and volunteers in downtown Cairo were planting flowers in the Midan and painting walls and pavements in white and black, as if covering the written signs of a country in uprising would make people forget about how much they have achieved so far.

Last Saturday, two desperate parents wandered crying around Tahrir for hours, showing people a bloodstained piece of carton carrying the dimm el-shaheed, the blood of their martyred son killed in the Midan on Friday, while the Army was reportedly shooting in the air in order to frighten what they still want people to think is only a small group of violent dawdlers. Will I ever forget those crying faces?

Sharif, one of the shebab temporarily opposing protests in Tahrir, says there are three different kinds of people:

There are people who work for the revolution, people who work against the revolution, and people who sit at home, watching television and believing whatever the news says.

One of the Army’s strongest points lies in the power of a dialectic, enforced by media still subjugated by a corrupted political system, aiming to divide those in favour of the revolution, keeping them at home and turning them into sceptical observers from afar. They say the people in Tahrir are baltageya, professional thugs whose job is to throw the country into anarchy and chaos, occasionally selling hashish during breaks.

The baltageya is indeed an actor on stage, but is a double-edged one. Even two inveterate supporters of the baltageya like Hosni Mubarak and former Interior Minister Habib el-Adly committed their last, fatal mistake by ordering the opening of state prisons on 28 January. The sight of “pro-Mubarak” supporters riding camels and storming into the crowd to beat peaceful demonstrators made protesters squeeze up.

Even those who already made up their minds and wanted to allow Mubarak to stay until September elections, suddenly found themselves shouting for his ouster. Almost three months after those events, the baltageya‘s double-edge is still a highly destabilising factor in the country, fully exploited by those reactionary forces willing to thwart the country’s path towards political normalisation.

But this is not enough. As a small number of Army officials joined demonstrators and refused to take off their uniforms last Friday, many protesters smelled a rat. This intrusion disclosed a glaring sign of division within the Army, but at the same time it legitimised the intervention of security forces.

After seeing them shooting in the crowd and clearing out the Midan, many protesters still fool themselves into thinking that the Army is the people’s only guardian, and that those who cleared out Tahrir were mercenaries paid by Mubarak’s personal friend and business Ibrahim Kamel. Even in this case, where was the Army when the people needed protection? Egyptians have to realise that the time - if there was ever one - when the people and the Army were iid wahda (one hand) are now definitely over, and handing over power to a civil presidential council is the only solution for the time being.

Here we come to the point. The recent escalation of violence is a sign that the Army’s divide and rule agenda is being successfully put forward. This urged the opposition to wisely call for a suspension of demonstrations, and for the cancellation of Friday’s milioneya, the march of the million calling for the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) to step down. This does not mean that revolutionary forces are satisfied with the Mubaraks’ or Kamel’s – fake – prosecution. “Our revolution is not against Mubarak,” one of the activists involved in the movement for the ‘Protection of the Revolution’ reminded me. “Our protests aim at a reversal of the 1952 coup d’état and the institution of a civil Presidential council”. Indeed, Field Marshall Mohammed Hussein Tantawi is a military man, like Mohammed Naguib, Gamal Abdel Naser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak before him.

When I asked an Egyptian friend for a definition of the baltageya, he told me “a baltagy is either someone who pushes you to do something you do not want to do or someone who prevents you from doing what you want to do.” Suspending protests this Friday means avoiding that open (and suicidal) confrontation the Army has been looking for since they mingled with those violent enemies of the people’s rightful demands.

The revolution has been played out in many other fields, but Midan Tahrir still remains the battleground for the protesters’ main political demands. Celebrating a new Friday of protests with an empty Midan Tahrir amounts to an important step towards the realisation of the revolutionary agenda, and shows that the revolution is gaining ground on, and understanding of, an increasingly chaotic panorama, remaining loyal at the same time to its peaceful character and refusing to bow heads in front of the SCAF’s cosmetic adjustments.

Davide Morandini is an Italian freelance photojournalist based in Cairo, Egypt. He reports for the Egyptian online newspaper Bikya Masr, and his personal blog is called c aironichles.

Report don't dispatch

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 12:32:24 +0000

Rule number one for journalists starting a blog in a foreign land, pick the blog's name carefully.

Meskel Square = clever, good, local. South by South West = geographic, but not specific, nice. Noodlepie = genius.

I've just picked a new name for a new website I'm planning. The name's bloody brilliant. How did I think of the name? Here's my foolproof list of words to avoid when naming a blog for journalists in odd places,

Avoid Dispatch. Or Dispatches.

"Dispatches from... (insert far away field + photo of white person standing somewhere unlikely + Moleskine notebook + linen suit, smiling while surrounded by non-white people) is not a good look. Avoid it.

Never ever use "Journo". Not once. Ever. Be careful with how you use Journalist. Likewise the word Foreign.

Avoid Beat. Never use Global. The BBC can use Global, but you can't.

And Correspondent. Or Letters. Or anything to do with the postal system.

Approach Reporter with care. And Reports. A couple of friends use one or the other and get away with it, but you probably won't.

Steer clear of Times, Chronicle, Journal and Inquirer. And Daily too. Chances are you'll get bored with blogging and Daily will just be a lie.

Record, Voice, Sentinel, Telegraph, Express and Courier are all a bit up themselves.

Independent will make you sound like a cutesy jingly-jangly shambling band from some 1985 hick English arsepit. And you're probably not really Independent anyway.

And don't use Wire. Never use Wire. Or criticise anyone who uses Wire.

Apart from that, anything goes. Oh... and if anyone wants @dispatches I'm open to offers.

Originally posted in the Kigaliwire Roughbook.